Security, surveillance, and sociological analysis.

Lyon, David ; Wood, David Murakami

INTRODUCTION

THE COLLAPSE OF the iconic twin towers of New York's World Trade Center in 2001 affected Canada in more ways than the loss of two dozen Canadians among the tragic deaths on that day. Immediately, American fingers pointed to supposedly lax northern border security that had facilitated terrorist action in the United States. Although this fabrication was eventually acknowledged as such, the damage was done. The defined situation was real in its consequences. In a bitterly ironic move, Canadian officials outdid themselves in demonstrating security vigilance with the result that several innocent Canadian citizens were whisked away by American forces in "extraordinary rendition," to suffer torture in Syria and Egypt and to have their lives torn apart by the experiences. The best known of these is Syrian-born Maher Arar, an Ottawa engineer (see O'Connor 2006). In each situation, the mishandling of personal information pertaining to the victims was crucial to their wrongful detention. Although security and surveillance are demonstrably central to this situation, with some notable exceptions (Calhoun 2002) sociological analysis did not figure strongly in attempts to understand it.

Especially since 9/11, security and surveillance have featured as prominent themes in news and current affairs. Scarcely a day passes without the appearance of some story appearing in the press, relating to one or both concepts. Strangely, these concepts are not common currency in sociology, even though more studies of surveillance have appeared from that stable than any other and studies of security are relatively common in one of sociology's sister disciplines, criminology. Here we make a case that more systematic sociological attention should be paid to security and surveillance just because they are fields of study crying out for careful and critical analysis of a kind that sociology offers. They are connected both with major currents of political--economic and technological power and also with everyday routines of mundane life and thus qualify--at the intersection of biography and history--as key topics for sociological imagination (Mills 1959).

In the post-9/11 era, then, security and surveillance are concepts that appear increasingly frequently as a pair, yet are all too often separated by disciplinary and semantic divisions of labor. Although it has common use meanings relating to personal safety and integrity, security as an academic concern has been predominantly in the area of International Relations (IR), and for most of the existence of this field, work in this area has concerned itself with diplomatic and military relations between nation states in the classic Westphalian model. In recent years, however, security as a field of study is also making its mark in criminology and sociolegal studies, often under the related rubric of "securitization." At the same time and in contrast, surveillance as an object of concern originally appeared largely as a national domestic issue both in its American sociological antecedents, for example, James Rule's Private Lives, Public Surveillance (1974) or as a product of particular modern but again national and domestic governmental practices and institutions in the Foucauldian tradition following Discipline and Punish (1977).

Both traditions are to an extent still limited by their histories and starting assumptions. IR and its transdisciplinary offspring, Security Studies, has undergone 20 years of challenge and reassessment, through first questioning of its largely military orientations and the previously dominant "realist" conception of national security (Buzan and Waever 2003), with concepts like human security, challenges from political economy, and a sometimes compatible, sometimes competing field of International Political Economy, with a significant cultural turn, and most recently with the emergence of a "new" or "critical" Security Studies that tries to integrate these challenges into the recasting of the aims of the whole field (Burgess 2010).

Meanwhile the last 20 years has seen the successful growth of another transdisciplinary field, Surveillance Studies, that has drawn on critical work in sociology, law, criminology, human geography, communications, cultural studies, and more (see Ball et al. 2012). This field has also burgeoned and, like Security Studies, formed productive international networks whose work has become well known in policy as well as more academic contexts. However, Surveillance Studies remains largely separate from even the New Security Studies and has largely neglected the international and the military, despite some attempts at communication and the establishment of at least comparative agendas by figures such as Didier Bigo, as well as the editors of this special issue, including joint sessions at the Canadian Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities (Bigo 2012; Lyon 2003; see also Leman-Langlois 2011; Salter 2010; Zureik and Salter 2005).

This continued separation has aspects that are puzzling but which are also explicable. The puzzling aspects derive from the fact that in the post-9/11 era, the spread and intensification of surveillance within nations and at international level is clearly driven by the rhetorics of security. On the one hand, these rhetorics derive their appeal from international security concerns in the era of the Revolution in Military Affairs--asymmetric conflict, threats of a more diffuse and unpredictable character than during previous periods, new "battlespaces" including cyberspace, the vertical (aerial and orbital), and the city (Graham 2010). However, the rhetorics are not directed at international actors but at national and local populations and even individuals. As one of us noted in a previous article that attempted to articulate this transformation, "security is coming home" (Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006).

On the other hand, the rhetorical thrust of security is also driven by emphases on risk and its management. The achievement of 9/11, after all, was not as pundits proclaimed to "change everything" but rather to give opportunity for already existing discourses of risk and of technological solutions. David Garland (2001) observes that risk, hardly on the horizon a mere 30 years ago, is now the word of the twenty-first century. As Richard Ericson (2007) noted in his final book, the current period has seen domestic agendas dominated by the language of war and "wars on everything" from teenage pregnancy through drugs to crime and terror. In this atmosphere, surveillance, and particularly high technology and digital surveillance, is almost always proposed as the ready-made answer to security concerns. In consequence, Ericson (2007) goes on, the state now "... extends surveillant assemblages that engulf all imaginable sources of harm: terrorists, health and welfare system cheats, corporate executives whose operations are implicated in catastrophic loss and underclass populations that signify disorder and decline" (p. 35).

Such an approach is also visible in the approach of International Political Sociology (IPS; and the journal of the same name), which, more than any previous work, indicates constructively the links between security and surveillance, sociologically understood. While accepting some insights of the so-called Copenhagen School of Security Studies, the IPS approach distinguishes itself by arguing that, especially since the states of exception prompted by 9/11, security issues are framed by competing forces of transnational bureaucracies and private agencies whose task is to "manage insecurity" (Bigo and Tsouskala 2008). This so-called (in)securitization process is expressed in the use of surveillance technologies affecting everyday life. Thus routine bureaucratic decisions, actual technologies plus a technologic, and ongoing rationalization and the quest for economic benefit work together as a dispositif or apparatus of (in)securitization. In the IPS approach this is often connected with Foucauldian analyses of governmentality.

For several important reasons, then, the broader sociological consideration of security and surveillance themes is overdue. The role of the military in social relations has long been a curious blind spot in much sociology (despite the would-be remedying efforts of theorists such as Anthony Giddens in the 1980s; Giddens 1985) but now security concerns have "come home" and are crucially important to more recognizably sociological themes. The sociological analysis of the "risk society" since Ulrich Beck's (1992) seminal contribution was for many years more associated with environmental crises than with the sorts of "national" security risks now taking center stage. However, work such as Ericson and Haggerty's on Policing the Risk Society (1997) highlights the direct connections between risk, policing, and surveillance, particularly through its analysis of the pivotal role of information gathering and processing.

It is also vital to note how political economy acts as a powerful driver of the fusion between surveillance and security. Although political economy has always been a compelling current within sociology, the need for a coherent stress on this dimension of social relations has seldom been stronger. It has an indisputable bearing on the direction of developments in security and surveillance. As noted by analyses of post-9/11 social formations (Lyon 2003; Webster and Ball 2003), the post-Cold War period saw a diversification of corporations previously reliant on the (and other national) military organizations for both purchases and research and development investment, in anticipation of a changed international order. Much of this restructuring saw priorities shifted by companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon in the United States, Qinetiq in the United Kingdom, Sagem in France, and many others, into areas of civil application for the kinds of technologies they had previously been developing for war. A rapidly expanding example of the political economy of security and surveillance is the global expansion of identification systems and biometrics that indicates clearly the diversification of military expenditures and expertise into domestic governance (Ball and Snider forthcoming; Gates 2011; Lyon 2009).

Even when it became clear that in fact military budgets would not shrink quite as much as anticipated, the new post-9/11 situation, as well as the piggybacking of technological solutions onto domestic "signal crimes" (Innes and Fielding 2002) like the U.K. bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Jamie Bulger murder case as well as the heightened security demanded for international "mega-events" like the Olympic Games or the G8 / G20 meetings (Bennett and Haggerty 2011; Graham 2012), the growth of private military and policing in the global south (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011), the ongoing conflict in the Middle East (Zureik et al. 2011), as well as significant national investments in domestic security through expanded Homeland Security budgets means that the new Security, rather than Military-Industrial Complex, has thrived and seems even more entrenched than ever. The current "age of austerity" and economic uncertainty has not slowed this either, as security tends to be one of the few areas that continues to grow precisely on the basis of perceived insecurity and fear.

Having noted several respects in which security and surveillance have become more closely tied together, both in practice and theory, and having observed that sociological interest in each is relatively lacking but clearly warranted, it is also worth indicating why they cannot be collapsed into each other for analytical purposes. Surveillance may be seen as a key means of procuring security at many levels and the two have arguably overlapping imaginaries, but it is a mistake to assume that they always belong together. Each may be considered as a social process with its own dynamic, organized by its own set of assemblages, so neither can be reduced to a reflex of the other. Theoretically, too, each is an essentially contested concept (as suggested above) with a range of legitimate provenances, meanings, and outcomes.

Both security and surveillance are what might be called portmanteau concepts in that they contain a variety of arguments, theories, methodologies, some of which are also shared in popular perceptions (see, e.g., Lyon 2007; Zedner 2009). Each is dynamic, as seen in the (unlovely) verb form of "securitization." Unfortunately, no such verb form exists for surveillance. Even the--equally unlovely--"surveilling" lacks the sense of social process yielded by securitization. Among other things, security speaks of a goal, an intended outcome, whereas surveillance speaks much more of a practice, method, or means. As we have seen, and this is particularly true of the IPS approach, surveillance frequently appears as a means to the end of security, definitional imprecision notwithstanding. In order to secure airports, for example, extensive and complex surveillance practices and technologies are deployed.

Security often requires surveillance but there are also other means by which security may be sought, such as, internationally, through diplomatic activity. Surveillance is often practiced in order to provide or procure security, but there are many additional purposes for which it may be applied. For instance, surveillance may be used to increase productivity and efficiency or to create consumers for particular products (see, e.g., Andrejevic 2009). Thus, it is appropriate that the two fields of Security Studies and Surveillance Studies see themselves both as close allies for strategic research purposes and as having important areas of legitimate focus that do not overlap. A further reason why this is worth noting is the fact that security and surveillance also vary in meaning historically and regionally. Security, for example, would often have been invoked in the 1970s in Europe in relation to social welfare, rather then necessarily to territorial protection as "national security." And while surveillance may now have a dominant connection with "national" security in the global north, in regions such as Central and Latin America it is more associated with urban crime and violence (Arteaga 2010).

That said, the interface between security and surveillance is a prime research area, one that is inevitably bound up with post-9/11 developments, especially in North America. Many themes of sociological import--such as, for example, the gendered and racialized ways that security agencies subject "Arabs" and "Muslims" to disproportionate surveillance (Razack 2007; Webb 2007)--are raised by the security-surveillance problematique although they may not necessarily fall under that rubric (the work may be about minorities rather than surveillance per se). Apart from anything else, there is still much work to be done in Security-and-Surveillance Studies, unraveling the fate of several Canadians subjected to extraordinary rendition. But it is equally the case that sociology brings some specific contributions to the transdisciplinary table of security surveillance. While Foucault's work transcends disciplinary pigeonholing, other emphases, such as the above-mentioned Weberian rationalization processes or the sociology of science and technology add significant value to our understanding of security and surveillance (see also, e.g., Monahan 2006).

This brings us to the articles chosen for this special issue, each of which touches on security and surveillance, but that all also illustrate the breadth of sociological analysis in this area. In the chosen set of articles, reference is made to key concepts such as risk, information processing, visibility, and social sorting but in the context of the empirical specificity of each area of analysis. Although this introduction comments on the mutual dependence of security studies and surveillance studies, in practice---in these articles--this is more implicit, with the analytical weight tending to fall primarily on one side or the other. Nonetheless, the themes explored here are both instructive and promising for further social analytical work at the interface of security and surveillance.

Dan Lett, Sean Hier, and Kevin Walby build on Kevin Haggerty's arguments about the "rhetorical politics of evaluation research" as an evidential knife fight, to examine how evaluations of the effectiveness of video surveillance (Closed-Circuit Television or CCTV) systems in four cities in Ontario (Sudbury, London, Hamilton, and Thunder Bay) have been deployed within municipal debates. They find that four kinds of rhetorical tactics are used when evaluations are discussed: substituting one set of statistics for another if the first proves unable to show a positive finding in favor of cameras; a deliberate mismatch of the evaluation criteria with the stated aims of the video surveillance program; the hiding of methods used to attain evaluation results; and finally, if the evaluations fail to show a desired result, the use of positive results from other places instead. Perhaps more importantly, however, these dubious practices are not even needed in some cases where the evaluations can effectively be ignored or de-emphasized when there is no pressure for them to take place or their results advertised, in what Lett et al. call "evaluation atrophy." They conclude with some possible scenarios for evaluations from Haggerty's "knife fight" through to progressive evaluation. Wisely, although they consider the barriers to each scenario, they venture no explanation of the ultimate likelihood, but given the evidence presented from the research they present here it would seem that the knife fights will continue for some time to come.

Unlike Lett et al., Philip Boyle's paper focuses not on the assessment of ongoing urban surveillance projects, but on the temporary security and surveillance surge associated with the "mega-event," in this case the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler. Boyle's paper highlights a particular development of risk-thinking and managerialism, that is the rise of "urban resilience," the emphasis on the ability of cities (often conceived of uncritically as some kind of natural object) to survive, bounce back, and thrive in the face of threats, particularly potentially disastrous ones. In common with the dominant trajectory of research into mega events (see, e.g., the papers collected in Bennett and Haggerty 2011), he emphasizes that the one-off nature of mega events only serves to highlight the broader and ongoing concern with urban vulnerability and the governance of uncertainty. The process is presented as stripped of politics (the core of the managerial approach), yet in its hiding of the political becomes more political still. Even the focus on potential disaster and worst cases as the defining feature of planning is in itself a political decision that tends to affect the marginal and the most vulnerable, particularly when the unified "nature" of the urban in the urban resilience already occludes difference. Thus questions of "the uneven distribution of preparedness," as Boyle notes. The key questions remain those of: what is being prepared for and by whom? And, whose resilience is really being promoted?

Uzma Jamil and Cecile Rousseau's article considers the subject positioning of South Asians in Montreal in the climate of security since 9/11. Reporting on the results of several years of ethnographic work in predominantly South Asian neighborhoods, the findings show strong evidence of a "chilling effect" on the engagement in political life and even political conversation particularly among more working class groups, widespread experience of the practical consequences of racial and ethnic profiling and state scrutiny, and a heightened visibility and vulnerability of South Asian subjects within the wider, predominantly white, European culture. These forms of negative subject positioning are experienced not just through skin color and perceived religion and national origin, but also through the circulation of, and reaction to names. Jamil and Rousseau also find that, despite generally negative experiences, there are significant variations in context and reaction based not just on social class but on migration histories and neighborhood. As they argue, "[t]he ramifications of these differences play out in terms of their relative sense of vulnerability or security within the host society, which in turn, affects their internalization of the negative images of Muslims and their responses to it." Particularly important, Jamil and Rousseau find strong support for Naber's Foucauldian theory of "internment of the psyche," something that is more that just self-surveillance--that behavior is altered because of one's perception of exposure--but a completing recasting of subjectivity based on fear and hurt, which is a key component in existential insecurity.

In a special issue that considers the intersection of surveillance and security, it is not surprising to find articles that consider policing. Sanders and Hannem present the results of some detailed empirical study of the street level practices of two different Canadian police agencies. They aim to test the assertion, common in Surveillance Studies, that new information technologies and practices, including surveillance and data mining, have changed practices. In studies of policing, this is usually seen in the turn to "Intelligence-Led Policing" (ILP) and how it has changed, or might change, the everyday work of officers. In fact, their findings indicate "how ILP has become a management philosophy of evidence-based resource allocation [...] which has not been carried to the front line." However, what the ready availability of stored and sorted information does appear to do is to provide new justifications for old prejudices. In others words, new technologies within sociotechnical assemblages tend to accentuate existing social divisions and stigma. Sanders and Hannem indeed warn of the use of information in the categorization of both people and places (cf. Graham and Wood, 2003) and how these new information practices "change the knowable." So it would seem that there is a division requiring further investigation, between a policy and strategic level of policing in which information plays a lead role in assigning policing resources and targeting particular populations and places, and a street-level practice which uses information and surveillance technologies as a resource in the performance of policing in much the same way as other kinds of resources previously and currently available to police officers. In other words, the assertions that Sanders and Hannem is testing are more or less valid depending on the scale at which one looks. It is also worth noting that one might get very different findings in other societies in which surveillance has more thoroughly penetrated the practice of policing, for example, the United Kingdom, as considered, for example, by Andrew Goldsmith (2010).

In the final piece, a report on research in progress, Daniel Trottier also considers policing faced with changes in information and surveillance technology and practices, but of a different kind: the way in which social media is both a resource for and a target of police surveillance. The former happens through the enrollment of the ordinary people as "citizens-spies" against others who are alleged to have committed crimes. This kind of "lateral surveillance" (Andrejevic 2004) is what William Mitchell (2003) might describe as a "wanted poster++," a digitally augmented and extended form of long-standing strategies in police communication with publics. The second is through the growing police gathering of information through social networks. They are far from the only ones: "open-source intelligence" via the monitoring and exploitation of personal information shared between people is now a key resource for policing, intelligence services, and corporations. Drawing on Andrejevic's notion of "digital enclosure," Trottier concludes that "Social media enable a diffuse kind of visibility for police work based on their broad and enduring saturation in social life. Police have relied on other techniques and technologies to watch over the public, but never has so much content been accessible in a single enclosure."

It is worth noting that this increase in the amount of captured and generated data (what is often now called "big data") is as much a problem for those conducting surveillance as an opportunity, and is one of several factors leading to changes in the ways in which surveillance is practiced, making this less about direct human relationships or even about human-organization relationships but is one of a number of ways in which social relationships are increasingly mediated by software codes.

Several other common themes emerge from these five papers: one is that, despite the movement toward big data, software mediation and technological interventions, human social relations are still of primary importance, whether this is in the context of the everyday practices of police officers, the ways in which surveillance is "sold" to publics, or the feelings of insecurity elicited in "othered" subjects.

Related to this, emotions matter too: the increasing dominance of insecurity, risk, and uncertainty as the basis for social organization is not simply a structural shift or a matter of changing organizational norms, but is also something strongly felt in individuals and groups, again whether one is talking about prejudices in policing or the daily experiences of hypervisibility in marginalized groups.

Each of these articles touches in important ways on questions of security, surveillance, and the relation between the two. Their emphases reflect our earlier discussion about how security and surveillance may be related, without closing off the possibilities for other forms of argument. Given the burgeoning political economy of security and surveillance on the one hand, and the home-and-street-level experiences of ordinary people encountering the fears and insecurities that are both cause and consequences of the deployment of security-and-surveillance apparatus on the other hand, it is likely that critical debates in this field will continue for some time to come.

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David Lyon, Sociology, Quean's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada N7L3N6. E-mail: lyond@ queensu.ca